Creating a 3D model is only part of the 3D design process. Once the model is created, it is just a solid white object, which doesn’t really fit into any game. With the 3D pot plant I created (which I talked about in a previous blog) it needed a texture on it so it fit into the scene we created.

The pot plant, when I imported it into our game scene, it was just a plain white object. This really didn’t fit into the scene.

Pot Plant model without textures

Because I made this model myself, the animators hadn’t made a texture for the object. This is where Unity’s inbuilt material creator came into effect. The look I was going for was a clay brick finish. I chose this colour because the level is set in a backyard, where clay pots are common.

I created the material in the editor and found a colour that was similar to what clay would look like on a pot. Once I found the colour I added the material to my pot plant. This instantly made the pot plant fit in the scene better. But it was missing the “plant”.

Fortunately for me, the animators created some great sunflowers with very nice textures. I added 2 sunflowers to my scene, and made them a child object of my pot. I then positioned them in the pot and created a prefab. The scene now had a pot plant with a texture and an actual plant, that my team could move around and add to our scene.